


ceaseless watched ones get his ass

by Avonya



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, beat! up! Elias!, inspired by a tumblr post by gonnahaveabigtalklater, not as bad as canon actually don’t worry, outsider pov, season 3 ish?? Timeline is wonky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:49:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24382336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avonya/pseuds/Avonya
Summary: After three weeks of nightmares, when Andrea is ready to snap, there is a change to the monotonous nightly terror: the eye-covered man is wearing a shirt with words.More accurately, the eye-covered man is wearing a shirt with hand written words. It reads “this is Elias Bouchard’s fault, he works at the Magnus Institute, office #160, sorry!”(Jon provides a little direction for some haunted statement givers)
Comments: 32
Kudos: 425





	ceaseless watched ones get his ass

**Author's Note:**

> Jon please use your spooky beholding powers to fuck up elias we’ve got ~30eps left I believe in you

The problems didn’t begin with the eye-covered man but they sure as hell led to him. Besides, the beast that the problems had begun with was dead, and you can’t exactly blame the dead, can you?

Well. You could. Andrea blamed the dead a whole lot: her mother, for the state of the house; her father, for the state of the barn; and her uncle, for the state of her life. See, Andrea’s family had money, but he squandered it. They had a house but it had fallen into ruin. They had a barn but it had effectively fallen into the earth. 

So, to sum up what Andrea has in her life, at the moment of her decision to go into London  _ again _ : a house held together with glue and duct tape, the remains of a barn, half of a gun (the part with the trigger!), the dumbest golden retriever she has ever met, and terrible, terrible, nightmares. 

The nightmares began after they killed the beast but they weren’t so bad until she went to that damn Institute and told the Archivist her story. 

It began with, as many countryside mysteries do, missing chickens. 

Patricia said the sound of the chickens dying wasn’t like anything she had ever heard. She said their screams cut through pouring rain, made her frantically call for the police. When they got to her house they found half the chickens gone and half lying dead. 

Well.  _ Presumably  _ half, considering they were, in Patricia’s words “eviscerated in a deeply unpleasant way.”

After Ricky’s sheep got slaughtered the town decided that something need to be done. Someone needed to go looking for the beast. Andrea thought it was a terrible plan, of course. Live and let live and all, and besides, the beasts tracks were absolutely _ginormous_. Big as a adult’s face, Eddy told her, with long claw prints that dug into the frozen November ground. Everyone had a grim idea in the back of their mind that one day the beast would get some drunk coming back from the bar, or catch a child out playing, and knew that they could not let it happen. 

So out they went. Andrea went along, of course, she was better with her gun than any of the others. She left the dog at home. Lingo wasn’t made for hunting.

Looking back, Andrea finds that the strangest thing about the whole nightmare situation wasn’t that the eye man was there, but that he didn’t slip into their profession like some evil doppelgänger. He just hovered on the edge of it all, _watching_ , with a blank expression. 

Sometimes he wore funny clothes. It didn’t do anything to the Andrea in the nightmare, of course, she would not get that relief, but at least it slightly settled the nerves of the Andrea that woke up screaming and soaked in sweat. 

Once he wore a jester’s hat. That was fun. Most often it was normal clothes, crumpled suit jackets, woolen sweaters, or oversized tee shirts. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to when the man was wearing pajamas and when he wasn’t, and what he wore didn’t change the watching, so it didn’t really matter. 

It ended, as many countryside mysteries do, with finding the beast. It was tucked up in a hole in the woods. And it was nothing like what Andrea had ever seen. It was massive, with shaggy, dirty, fur, crusted with blood and mud. The stench of blood and rotting meat was heavy and it pressed down on Andrea like it was an actual, physical, presence. 

When she tries to remember what happened during the day she can only recall the screaming. At night it is like she is living it again, and again, and again. 

Night after night the beast rakes its claws across Ricky’s chest, cutting him in two before he can scream. It gets Eddy, too, but he doesn’t die, he turns his gun on Andrew with a rabid scream that ends in a wail when Marcy, blood streaming from a cut in her forehead, stabs him in the back. Marcy turned to finish Andrew but Jackson got her before she could, a wild look in his eyes, mouth twisted into a sneering grin. 

Andrea was terrified. She wanted to run when the beast turned its glare on her, full of hate and bloodshed, but she didn’t. 

Fight or flight, Andrea supposes. And night after night, every damn nightmare, she chooses to fight. She got the eyes, first, and the beast wailed, and then shot the rest of her rounds in its brain and heart. Mick covered her by bashing Elizabeth over the head when she swung at Andrea with her blood encrusted hands. Adam tried to shoot Andrea and Mick got him in the knee before he could. 

By the end of it there were three of them alive. Andrea had walked into that clearing with two dozen people and had come out with _two_. 

No one took her seriously when she said it wasn’t a normal beast. So she went to the place where someone would have to actually listen.

After three weeks of nightmares, when Andrea is ready to snap, there is a change to the monotonous nightly terror: the eye-covered man is wearing a shirt with words. 

More accurately, the eye-covered man is wearing a shirt with hand written words. It reads “this is Elias Bouchard’s fault, he works at the Magnus Institute, office #160, sorry!”

Andrea calls out of work that morning. She’s come down sick, so unfortunate!

Andrea packs a bag. Her gun broke when the beast grabbed it, its last, dying, act, and besides, she’s not sure if she could sneak a gun all the way to London. So she packs the longest knife she has, and calls Patricia to comewatch Lingo in case she gets arrested, and gets on a train. 

It is two trains and a bus to the Magnus Institute but Andrea is patient. She looks up pictures of the staff of the Magnus Institute on the way. She finds a picture of Elias Bouchard, which she saves to her phone, and a picture of the Archivist that had taken her statement. Jonathan Sims, it said. He looked enough like the eye-covered man for Andrea to conclude that somehow, this man had been visiting her dreams. 

Andrea spends the rest of the final leg of the trip methodically coloring over the saved picture of Elias Bouchard in her annotating app. She starts with the eyes, crossing them out with thin black lines. 

There is a man who gets off at the same stop as her. Andrea only notices him because they bump into each other, which is a totally normal thing to happen in a crowded city like London, but he’s walking in the same direction and he’s got such a determined look in his eyes. Andrea notices that there is dirt under his nails and that his hands are cracked and dry. 

She doesn’t need to ask to know that he is also going to the Magnus Institute, and she doesn’t want to ask how they knew to come at the same time. He meets Andrea’s eyes and they nod to each other. 

Along the way their little vengeance party picks up more people. There’s a woman with a scar in the shape of a hand on her face, and a man with a dazed expression, and a woman who has covered her arms and legs with glow sticks, and a man who firmly does not take his left hand from his pocket, and more, of course, with less visible afflictions. 

It’s almost like a parade!

A short woman with curly hair dyed blue at the ends is leaning against the outside wall of the Magnus Institute when Andrea and the rest of their misery parade arrives. She’s talking to a tall, handsome man with a bitter expression. 

The woman takes them all in. Andrea found herself leading the way the longer the walk went on so she decides to be the one to speak. 

“Hello,” Andrea says, and pauses. She’s not sure how direct to be. 

“Hi,” the woman says. She eyes their crowd and looks to the man next to her, one eyebrow raised. “I’m Melanie. Is this a tour group?”

“No tours at the Institute,” the man cuts in. “You should all run while you still can, actually.”

“We’re not going to leave,” Andrea says. She weighs the two— Melanie, and whatever the man’s name is— in her head and decides that they probably would let Andrea and her new friends do what they had come to do. “We’re here to kill Elias Bouchard.”

There’s no sudden flare of argument from the crowd behind Andrea which both means that she correctly saw them for what they were and that she won’t need to make any awkward explanations to some lost tourists. 

Melanie smiles, an expression that lights her whole face up, and steps aside to let them pass. The man stops her. 

“Wait. Who sent you?”

“They eye-covered man told us, in our dreams,” the man with the dirty hands says.

The glow stick woman nods. “He said it’s Elias Bouchard’s fault!”

“The Archivist,” Andrea clarifies, because she’s not quite sure if this Jonathan Sims is _always_ covered in eyes or if that’s only a nighttime thing. He wasn’t when Andrea gave her statement but it could be a new development. 

Finally the man smiles too, but it is a sour and twisted smile. Either way, he moves to let them pass. “Knew he could do something right,” he says. 

Andrea leads the crowd of people into the lobby of the Institute. Lots of eye imagery, first of all, something she hadn’t really noticed on her first trip. Doesn’t matter. Melanie and the man come up to the front of the group to walk with Andrea. 

Melanie’s smile is electric. She somehow already had a knife. Andrea grins right back and pulls out her own. 

(They can’t kill Bouchard, as it turns out. He had seen them coming and had called the police, who met them outside his office. 

But he did come out to gloat at them and as it turned out, the woman with the facial scar was quite skilled in throwing stuff and she caught the bastard off guard with a shoe to the face. The rest of them didn’t have to be as accurate. Having the numbers will do that for you! 

Andrea didn’t get to kill Elias Bouchard. But she did get to beat the shit out of him from a distance. And for Andrea, that was enough.)

**Author's Note:**

> Tim returns to the archives missing both of his shoes and his wallet. Melanie’s missing shoes, wallet, knife, and pepper spray. They are the happiest Jon has seen them in a while
> 
> Comments fuel me so say hi! I’m also (barely) on tumblr also as avonya!


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